The invention relates to the technical sector of packing of articles, with special reference to those devices which collect the articles from a storage container in which they are loosely arranged, and feeds them to a station in which gripping organs are located which remove them individually and transfer them, for example, to an input line of an automatic machine.
The prior art dealing with such devices comprises many and various technical solutions, each of which is aimed at satisfying specific needs, according to the shape of the articles destined to be treated.
For the present purposes elongate articles are considered, which are to be fed to an automatic machine arranged downstream of the device, with a predetermined position and orientation.
A known solution for collection of elongate articles, known as a slat conveyor, comprises a first conveyor the initial part of which is immersed in the pile of loose articles and develops in an upwards direction; the first conveyor is constituted by a sort of escalator in which each step is activated with alternating ascending and descending motion, in suitable phase-relation to the others; when two consecutive steps are in the respective higher and lower position, they are aligned and the article borne on the lower step transfers by force of gravity to the upper step, thanks to a special inclination of the “tread” of the steps; the articles, therefore, progressively ascend all the steps and are unloaded onto a second conveyor which develops horizontally and perpendicularly with respect to the output of the articles from the first conveyor.
Means for detecting the position of the articles are located in the second conveyor and downstream of the means for detecting are located the gripping organs of the single articles.
The drawbacks of the above-described constructional solution regard firstly the complexity of the mechanism required to realize the first conveyor and, secondly, a certain frequency of malfunctioning due to the fact that because of the passage between the first and the second conveyor, the positions of the articles on them are very uncertain and subject to faulty conditions, such as, for example, piling up and/or one article lying over another.
A further drawback of the known solution relates to the difficulty of changing format for the first conveyor, due to the dimensional constraint between the depth of the steps and the transversal dimension of the articles.